The Self-Help Group Resilience Project: Developing and Piloting a Resilience Intervention in Bihar, India

This paper describes the development of a resilience-based self-help group (SHG) curriculum for an illiterate, adult, female population in rural Bihar and highlights lessons learned for future program development. We describe the curriculum development and include tables with all elements of the curriculum in its final form. We describe two different pilots of the curriculum and offer observations from qualitative and quantitative data, focus-groups, and observer-reports. The present resilience-based SHG intervention was built from an existing intervention for girls and was adapted and enhanced by input from women participants. Pilots indicated that the Self-Help Group Resilience Project is feasible, relevant, and acceptable, suggesting that it shows promise as an SHG program to strengthen the resilience of illiterate women in low- or middle-income country settings. Future practitioners and researchers might consider further refinement of the curriculum and additional testing using efficacy trials, as well as investigating whether other resilience-based curricula may be feasible, relevant, and acceptable in combination with different interventions meant to build economic empowerment for other populations and/or in other settings.